What Happened This Week?

What Happened This Week?

Well, this has been a week with some important news and updates. I won’t go in each and every detail, but just few tits and bits.

Google continues to play childish. It again strikes directories and paid links sites. Many inner pages of directories went down to PR0 or a gray bar. Some unlucky directories even got PR0 on their homepage. Yeah, i know how disgusting this is. But anyways, we just found one more reason to say “Goodbye Google Pagerank“.

Larry Page, The co-founder of Google Inc has decided to tie a knot with his girlfriend next month. Larry and Lucy Southworth, his girlfriend, will get married on 8th of December’07. The location is still undisclosed. Larry is one of the world’s wealthiest man. As a matter of fact, he is the Silicon Valley’s richest bachelor with a fortune worth about $20 billion. Well, the couple will definitely be showered with all webmaster’s blessing… even from web directory owners..

India won the Indian Oil Cup in cricket. It was a 5 match series against cricket rivals Pakistan. They clinched the series 3-2 and very convincingly. All of a sudden, Indian cricket looks promising with likes of Mahindra Singh Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir. Well, i wish them more success in the future.

Matt Hulett, WidgetBucks‘ CEO announced that traffic from outside US and Canada (which they term as “International Traffic”) is unlikely to buy from a U.S merchant website because of various obvious reasons. This resulted in dropped RPC (Rate Per Click). From now on, merchants will not pay for the clicks from International Traffic and neither will the publishers get credits for any clicks coming from the same traffic. So best way out is to implement a geo-based ad placement service to determine when to display a WidgetBucks ad widget and when to display other advertising options. This new announcement however does not effect the Ocyober and first half of November earnings, by the way.

WordPress 2.3 (The latest version) was a nightmare for many wordpress powered blog owners. Specially for the ones who upgraded their blog from previous wordpress versions. The new version has many new and exciting features. The built in tag option is an excellent feature. But problems came when the blog were upgraded from 2.2.x version to 2.3 version. Everything in admin panel stopped working. All one could see were bugs and lot of errors. Many wordpress plugins proved to be incompatible with this new version. Some even faced problems with the themes they were using. Well, a solution would be out soon, like probably a WordPress 2.3.1 or something. But if you’re upgrading your blog’s wordpress version, you better be taking backups before doing so.

From the Formula One corner, well Fernando Alonso quit McLaren couple of weeks back. The news i last heard was that his former partner, Renault, are trying hard to convince Alonso to join them, once again. Other than Renault, there are good amount of talks going on between Alonso and Red Bull as well. Fernando Alonso hasn’t decided anything yet. It’s just a matter of time. I think he will go with Renault, with whom he won the 2005 and 2006 Drivers’ titles.

On my end…well i am thinking about dropping my idea on “Google Friendly Web Directory“. My “FREE” directory lost all it’s PR and finally came down to PR0. Remember, it’s a free directory and not a paid link selling directory. The Google’s PageRank algorithms and the kiddish behavior on paid links sucks big time. So there is no point making a blah blah friendly directory.

That’s all this week. I hope the forthcoming weeks have something good in store for me…. and us!